Tag Archives: live chat

Article first published in March 2018, updated July 2019

Email marketing is a proven technique for building rapport with your prospects and customers. When you combine it with live chat, you can bump your conversion rates and improve the overall customer experience.

Creating a back-and-forth relationship with customers is critical if you want to thrive in business. That’s why keeping in touch through live chat will increase conversions by roughly 8 times, according to a study by Smart Insights.

Source: Really Good Emails

When live chat is combined with email marketing, you can communicate in a way that fosters better customer engagement, maximizes conversions, and increases sales. Today, we’re sharing how to combine live chat and email.

Understanding the power of live chat

Through your online marketing activities, you’re driving traffic to your website. You have even been very effective in converting a high percentage of those visitors to your email list. However, how effective are you at converting visitors into customers?

The average conversion rate is between 1-5%. In fact, on average, only 2% of visitors end up making an inquiry or purchase. If the conversion rate of your website is lower than 2%, for example, then you can up your game by engaging website visitors and prospects with a live chat.

If your website visitors have browsed through your web pages, then there is a level of interest. However, there may be something stopping them from buying. Maybe they have questions about shipping or don’t understand your product packages. When there’s live chat, you’re able to answer all the questions your visitors have.

Forrester reports that 55% of U.S. online adults are likely to abandon their online purchase if they can’t find a quick answer to their question, and 77% say that valuing their time is the most important thing a company can do to provide good online customer service. Live chat gives customers instant access to someone who can answer their questions.

For example, through the use of proactive live chat, Intuit was able to increase average order value (AOV) by 43% on its checkout page, conversion rate by 195% on its lead generation page, and sales by 211% on its product comparison page.

Intuit Live Chat Increased Conversions and Sales

Using live chat to connect with website visitors

When visitors are on your website, they often browse through a number of pages. We can place these visitors into two categories:

Those who are browsing.
Those who are assessing your product and are potentially interested in purchase.

While browsing through your products, there are questions going through their minds. This is why you should send greetings to your potential customers via live chat.

This encourages your leads to start a conversation with your customer support staff and they can easily ask their questions without having to initiate the conversations themselves.

How do you go about this? A visitor who has spent time on your website is probably checking things out. After a period of time, let’s say 5 minutes, you can invite your visitors for a chat. This would help you meet their current needs and show the visitors how much you care about them.

In fact, visitors invited to chat are 6.3X more likely to convert to customers than the ones who don’t chat. Also, 61% of those customers convert within the first chat.

You can also have specific events trigger live chat. For instance, if they’re on your sales page and you want to assist during the process, there could be an automatic greeting to the visitor.

Here’s an example from Tagove (now Acquire) that triggers a live chat when a user lands on a 404 page so they can help the user find what he/she is looking for.

Tagove Live Chat Proactive Greeting

Collecting a customer email address before chatting with them

When you offer live chat on your website, it’s an opportunity to gain more leads by increasing your subscriber list. How do you do this? You have an email subscription form before the beginning of a live chat session.

Capturing a user’s email address means you can easily send them messages about new products that could be of interest to them. It also allows for a better connection between you and your customers. By sending email newsletters that are personalized to your customers, you can even turn them into repeat customers.

For example, Maids in Black uses a pre-chat form on their website. The form has two fields, asking for an email address as well as the question. It also gives the user the option to either send an email to or to chat.

Maids in Black Email Subscription Form before Live Chat

Encouraging your email subscribers to experience your chat session

Sometimes, customers don’t use features of your website because they don’t know they’re available. Live chat allows you to answer questions and help users through the process when they need your help most.

To increase live chat usage, let your website visitors know about it. Invite them to your website to chat with an agent.

Engage Website Visitors with Live Chat

This is especially important when you send emails to your email subscribers. When you send them product offers, you should tell them that live chat will be available during the purchase process in case they run into a hitch.

This will encourage some of your subscribers to check out your product because you’re already offering a timely answer to any questions they may have.

Use email to follow up “warm” chats

When a prospect visits your website, one of the first requests should be for their email address via chatbot. Of course, this has to be done tactfully. One reason this is important is that it can help you follow up if they haven’t made a purchase.

As powerful as live chat is, it has one major weakness—unlike email, you can’t contact visitors when they leave your site. This is one reason you need to use live chat and email together. Sometimes, all a customer needs to make a purchase decision is a gentle reminder of the purchasing process they started. By gathering all your live chat data and checking for warm leads, you can create a list of potential customers to follow up on.

Proper live chat and email management is a great way to harvest big data that you can use to run successful email marketing and chatbot marketing campaigns. So, don’t be afraid of using your chatbot link in your emails—the two make a great tag team.

Adding a link to the chatbot in emails

Another great way to use chatbots in tandem with your email marketing campaigns is by putting a link to your chatbot in your email. Here are two clever ways of using a chatbot link in your emails.

Let customers know you’re approachable

If your reader needs answers to questions regarding your products or services, let them know they can click the link to your chatbot.

Source: Yahoo Mail

Not only will they get the answers they need from your chatbot (or live agent) but their interaction with your chatbot will provide you with a wealth of data you can use to improve your customer journey.

You can also use your chatbot to help address FAQs. By directing your customers to your chatbot, you free up your customer representatives to deal with issues that need human input. This, by far, is one of the biggest advantages of chatbots as far as customer support goes.

Feedback on orders

When sending a receipt of purchase to your customer, you can also include a link to your chatbot. Let them know they can reach out to you through that link if they need:

To know the shipping status
Help using the product
Report any defects or faults

Adding a link to your chatbot in your emails is a great way of offering proactive customer support. Additionally, it’s a well-known fact that great customer support is a key ingredient in building a loyal customer base.

Wrap up

Offering live chat on your website can boost your conversions. And the good news? You can even make your live chat better when you combine it with email marketing.

You get more of your email subscribers to participate in a live chat session and you get your live chat users to become email subscribers. It’s a win-win scenario, no matter the approach you adopt.

The digital age has opened up a lot of opportunities for brands to better reach and serve their customers. Chatbots are one such opportunity. As such, part of your duties as a marketer should include live chat and email management.

For more details on the state of digital marketing, particularly in relation to email, check out our digital marketing predictions for 2019.

Guest contribution from BestVPN – updated May 2019

Top marketers cite email marketing as a great way to drive traffic, nurture leads, and generate sales. And, when you look at the data, you can see why. On average, email yields a 4400% ROI—every dollar spent on email marketing results in $44 back.

However, with all this good news comes one fundamental problem: Getting someone to opt in to your email list is tough. On average, a person gets 121 emails every day. People are being overwhelmed with offers, coupons, and promotions. It’s becoming harder to convince people to give you their email address when they’re receiving messages from so many sources.

Nevertheless, that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. Here are four proven ways to increase your email opt-in rate and grow your list.

1. Use tactics for lead generation.

Almost every site looking to collect emails and grow their list has sidebars with boring, weak calls to action (CTAs) that don’t work. Plus, using the same tactics for decades produces diminishing returns.

For example, when live chat was first implemented for big brands, it focused on support only. So, if someone didn’t want to call a hotline or send an email and wait days for a response, they could talk to a live sales rep.

But, nowadays, live chat is hugely successful for lead generation. It’s becoming a vital tool in customer onboarding and lead procurement. Latest data shows that 44% of consumers state that a live sales rep was vital to helping them complete a purchase online.

But that’s not all. Live chat was cited as the communication tool with the highest satisfaction levels. When 52% of people will abandon their cart because they can’t find answers fast, live chat is the place to be.

And it goes beyond a simple customer service tool. You can easily collect emails for your list in a more natural way than standard web forms. For example, Drift recently stripped their site of forms and used live chat as their sole lead gen tool. When landing on their site, you’re prompted with a live-chat engagement message.

drift-live-chat-lead-gen

According to their data, of the people who clicked on the opening message, 63% became leads on their list.

Similarly, Directive Consulting is using the same strategy, engaging potential clients the moment they land on site.

directive-consulting-chat-leads

This works to (1) qualify potential leads instantly and (2) capture emails for their list in a natural, conversational format.

Emerging lead generation tactics

There are many new tactics that can improve your lead generation practices. The one that has the most success with conversion rates is probably double opt-in emails. However, other measures can also shape your readers’ views and convince them they want opt in to all your future communications.

Using double opt-in as a confirmation step

Double opt-in is the best way to ensure your subscribers are dedicated and willing to receive your campaigns. Anyone who knows your email address has the ability to use it and sign you up for unwanted lists with a single opt-in system. This makes most people a little more wary of companies that still use the single opt-in strategy.

email example - opt-in strategies

Source: Pinterest

Not only is it good practice to use a confirmation step in your subscriber process, legislation may also require it. According the new GDPR laws in the European Union, double opt-in is the easiest way to prove “a clear affirmative action” before you start sending marketing emails to a new list member.

There are different opinions on whether GDPR explicitly requires a confirmation step, but it does clearly place the burden of proof on the sender. So erring on side of caution is advisable.

Upgrade your content strategies.

Subscribers may want information about your products, but they want to know about you too. Newsletters and regular features drive a content-rich campaign when shared with a wider audience than simply those who initially signed up.

Content upgrades can include PDF blog posts, cheat sheets, webinars, or knowledge base articles. Any one of these approaches—when used appropriately—can increase your lead generation and, most importantly, foster a relationship between you and your subscribers.

Create opportunities for feedback.

Using a survey or opinion poll will give recipients an opportunity to engage with your brand or service and can provide valuable insights for future content or marketing campaigns.

email example - opt in strategies

Source: Pinterest

If you add benefits to the equation, no doubt, subscribers will willingly participate. If you give the people on your lists a voice, they’ll most likely reciprocate with improved conversion rates.

If all else fails, offer freebies.

If double opt-in, content upgrades, and crowd participation campaigns don’t seal the deal, offer freebies. This can be in the form of gated content, product giveaways, redeemable coupons, or free trials for software.

2. Employ exit intent pop-ups (they still work).

Exit intent boxes are a pop-up style function that appear once the user moves to close a current window. For example, if you landed on a site, browsed a few pages, and then moved your cursor to close the tab, the website would initiate a pop-up to entice you to stick around.

Unlike light boxes or instant pop-ups when you first land on the site, they’re only shown when users are about to leave, lowering the risk of annoying them, while also giving you one last shot at driving a signup. Since users are about to exit your site, there’s virtually no downside.

For exit-intent popups, keep them simple, like Search Engine Journal does. Leveraging social proof (“Join 23,857 marketers and counting”), Search Engine Journal entices users to download a free eBook of valuable content for a simple email exchange.

3. Create better CTA offers.

Nobody wants another email jamming up an already-cluttered and disorganized inbox, which means the cost of entry is higher for you. That means your offer better be incredible.

Your button copy and value proposition have to be on point if you want higher conversion rates—instead of the typical call-to-action buttons and using “subscribe” links, which can turn people off.

Convince them that they can’t leave without getting this deal, that giving you their email is a no-brainer based on the value they receive in return. Birchbox uses a light-box to draw attention to their email signup form, and tells site visitors what they’ll get when they do.

birchbox-lightbox-email-signup

To do this, make sure that your button copy and value proposition answer this critical question: What is the most important, direct benefit that a user will get from clicking? For example, will they: boost rankings by six spots? Increase email open rates by 32%?

Check out how ContentVerve inspired signups using these ideas.

contentverve-lead-magnet

You should always be testing your CTA copy to see what offers resonate with your leads.

4. Run Facebook lead ads to engage social users.

Chances are you’ve generated quite a bit of traffic on social media. Many businesses use Facebook Ads as a huge driver of awareness. It’s your job to capitalize on those ads and combine your efforts with email.

Even if you don’t have any traffic on your Facebook page, using lookalike audiences, you can target customers who share similar interests as your current customers, giving you a shot at reaching new targets and collecting tons of leads.

You can use ads to capture email addresses. For example, check out this Facebook Lead Ad from The Skimm.

Just recently, Ladder.io used the same tactic, implementing lead-based ads to collect emails for their list. Using Lead Ads, they decreased their average cost per email acquisition by 80%.

To get started, create a new campaign on the Facebook Ads Manager and select “Lead generation” as your primary objective.

Wrap up

Email is a key driver of sales for tons of businesses worldwide. It provides a massive ROI when compared to other marketing tactics. Still, none of that matters if you can’t get people on your email list. These days, people get hundreds of emails each day just at work—not to mention all the promotional content they receive from companies.

It’s becoming harder and harder to convince someone to give you their email. Instead of using age-old tactics like a CTA sidebar, try re-inventing the wheel by using some of the tactics outlined here.

This post was originally published in April 2018